Porter & Sail’s Deepak Shrivastava on What to Watch For in 2019

What’s on the modern traveler’s mind in 2019? We turned to Deepak Shrivastava, co-founder of app Porter & Sail. The omni-channel platform provides travelers with all-in-one functionality—hotel recommendations and booking, upgrade enrollment, neighborhood guides, mobile check-in—before, during and after their trip.

Spherical’s rolling out a partnership with the app, and recently sat down with Shrivastava to talk about how travelers are pushing the entire industry forward. Here are five trends he thinks are changing the game. (And don’t miss our full interview with him, below!)

Content, Content, Content

“Through our content, what we found is premium guest engagement. Guests want to know where to go, what to do, and they want to experience that in a very authentic manner. That’s where the guest value is.”

Mobile-First Travel

“How do people communicate nowadays? It’s by email, it’s via their mobile phones.”

Holistic Approaches Win

“The guest or prospective guest makes multiple decisions, they have so many options. So you need to take a holistic approach, where the hotel becomes an advocate for the neighborhood…in all touchpoints that the hotel has with the guest.”

Thinking Like a Discoverer

“A discovery piece should be applied to booking. Porter and Sail is excited about facilitating booking through the lens of someone who is trying to discover where to go, what to do, and what to explore. That to me is the next maturity level in terms of the evolution of booking. ”

Green Tech for Good

“I like to define sustainability as the ‘new luxury.’ Luxury is not necessarily defined as a fancy chandelier at the Mandarin…Think about the fervor around single use plastics and keyless entry. We can leverage technology to actually enhance not only the guest experience, but think of it from the perspective of sustainability. ”